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President Trump who doesn’t miss any opportunity to condemn “radical Muslim terrorism” could not bring himself to condemn yesterday’s white nationalist terrorism in Charlottesville, Virginia. Instead, he condemned hatred and bigotry “on many sides.”

The white supremacists with confederate flags and the neo-Nazis with the Third Reich’s swastika flags came to Charlottesville equipped with guns, rifles, baseball bats, and an assortment of other weaponry—not to peacefully “Unite the Right” but to meet counter-demonstrators with violence.

When a 20-year old man from Ohio drove deliberately into a crowd of people, it was an act of vehicular terrorism—similar to jihadist attacks in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden. Terrorists learn from each other; they copy what they perceive as successful act of terrorism regardless of their ideology, their grievances, and their causes.

Interestingly, the perpetrator’s mother told reporters that she thought the event her son attended had “something to do with Trump.”

It did. The alt-right movement that has finally consolidated the various strains of white supremacy, white nationalism, and Neo-Nazi groupings was during the campaign and remains squarely on the side of fierce Trump supporters. On the eve of the violent demonstration, White supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke said,

“This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. That’s what we gotta do.”

Some of the white nationalists wore Trump’s red caps with the slogan “Make America Great Again.”

Even though, Trump did not call the vehicular attack “terrorism” nor did he distance himself from the Alt-Right.

For a good reason: He is morally impotent with respect to the dangerous Alt-Right ideology with its ugly takes on domestic politics and foreign policy as long as he has prominent Alt-Righters among his advisers in the White House starting but not ending with the ex-Breitbart boss Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka.

Even if his chief-of-staff or someone else convinces Trump to condemn alt-right terrorism, the president cannot be believed as long as the Bannon contingent remains in the White House.

He spent political capital by firing Acting Attorney General Sally Yates und FBI Director James Comey for not buckling under his pressure tactics; he lost moral authority by bullying Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others for the same reasons.

Trump and his supporting cast do not merely spin reality, they outright lie.

And yet “the Russian thing” becomes more threatening by the day--for President Trump and for members of his family and his supporting cast.

Even Mr. Trump must now fear the truth in the German proverb: Lies have short legs…

Judging from some Republicans’ warnings, Trump would be ill advised to follow his urge to fire AG Sessions to clear the way for removing Special Prosecutor and former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

That’s why there is reason to worry about Trump’s next possible steps to remove “the Russian thing” from media and public attention.

One sure way to put “the Russian thing” on the back burner would be a major foreign policy crisis—especially one involving military conflict. As we know all too well, in such crises both newsrooms and the public tend to rally around the flag and around the president.

That’s why Senator Lindsey Graham’s revelation that Mr. Trump contemplates military actions against North Korea is so worrisome. According to Newsweek, Graham said, "There will be a war with North Korea over their missile program if they continue to try to hit America with an ICBM. [Trump] has told me that. I believe him, and if I were China, I would believe him too."

Of course, North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities are major threats to many countries’ national security—including ours. Trump told Graham, “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here.”

First, then, this president makes clear that he does not care about foreign victims of war and second, he seems unaware that tens of thousands of U.S. troops are deployed near the border between the two Koreas.

With the diplomatic capabilities of the Department of State dangerously curtailed, key positions in the department and in missions overseas not filled, the prospects for skillful diplomacy are slim. Add to that an inexperienced Secretary of State who seems to be dodged by Trump’s son-in-law and others in the White House.

Taking off from following the unreal reality show presented by President Donald Trump day-in and day-out is a very healthy exercise.

I know first-hand. And I recommend it.

Instead of following every turn and twist in the never ending flow of far from normal Trump tweets, White House infighting and chaos, and the do-nothing congress, I decided a few weeks ago to limit my news consumption to shorter time periods early and late in the day.

To be sure, even limited exposure to news kept me abreast of the White House circus and its effects at home and abroad.

But relief from being troubled all day long about the latest news dispatches is exhilarating, relaxing, and productive.

Whether hitting a golf ball and swimming or researching and writing—everything is so much more pleasurable and focused.

Since politics, media, public opinion are among my primary research and teaching interests this limited news experience will be short lived.

With August in sight, I will resume news checks during the day—but not as regular as before my partial time off.

As shocking as it is, nobody should be surprised about last night’s horrific terrorist attack in London starting with a van ploughing into pedestrians on iconic London Bridge and continuing with the killing and injuring of people by three jihadists armed with deadly knives. The incident took the lives of seven persons and injured 48. Since it was first reported, it has remained breaking news all-the-time.

As I see it, this terrorist attack is another in the latest string of over-covered terrorist incidents that may have inspired extremists to utilize a tactic for the sake of global publicity.

The series of similar attacks began on July 14, 2016: Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel (31) drives a 20-ton truck into a huge crowd watching Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, France, killing 84 and injuring several hundred persons. The perpetrator is shot; ISIS claims responsibility. The shocking incident receives prominent and extensive global news coverage. In the following eight months there are at least four other lethal vehicular attacks in the West— at a Christmas market in the center of Berlin, in Jerusalem, on London’s Westminster Bridge, and at a popular department store in Stockholm. Additionally, solo-attackers in cars are either killed or arrested by police on the campus of Ohio State University in the U.S. and near a shopping center in Antwerp, Belgium, before they can kill.

This surge in vehicular strikes was merely the latest example of terrorists imitating particularly shocking and heavily covered modes of attack. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, Palestinian terrorist groups staged a number of spectacular hijackings of commercial airliners. Eventually, other groups, among them the German Red Army Faction and the Lebanese Hezbollah, carried out their own hijacking shockers.

While the take-over of planes remained fairly popular among terrorists, the highly publicized take-over of embassies proved contagious as well. According to a study by the Rand Corporation, there were 43 successful embassy take-overs and five failed attempts between 1971 and 1980 in 26 countries. “Like many other tactics of terrorism, hostage-taking [in embassies] appears to be contagious,” Brian Jenkins concluded. “The incidents do not fall randomly throughout the decade, but occur in clusters.” The idea here is that one event inspires another one. Presumably, terrorists knew of these takeovers from media reports since these incidents took place in a host of different countries on different continents. By late 1979, when the Iran Hostage Crisis began, the “students” who took over the U.S. embassy in Teheran and the Iranian leaders who backed them must have known about the prominent news coverage such incidents received. After all, of the embassy takeovers during the 1970s, more than half occurred in the last two years of the decade.

The massive coverage of ISIS atrocities, too, was not lost on ISIS devotees in various parts of the world. Shortly after the gruesome decapitation of James Foley in 2014, 30-year old Alton Nolen attacked former colleagues at a food plant in Moore, Oklahoma, beheading Colleen Hufford and seriously wounding a second woman. Nolen was a convert to Islam who had tried to convert his colleagues—without success. A month later, when Zale Thompson, 32, and another convert to Islam attacked a group of New York police officers with a hatchet, the conclusion was that he had planned to behead his targets. Similar incidents took place in Europe, Australia, and elsewhere. There is little doubt that those successful and failed modes of attack were examples of copy-cat violence.

Not enough that GOP leaders and foot soldiers in Congress, elected offices around the country, and so-called experts in think tanks continue to defend the indefensible in the Trump campaign, transition operation, and White House. What many observers described as the adults around Trump, cool-headed generals, have surrendered as well.

John Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security and H.R. McMaster, the National Security Adviser, went public this weekend with nonsensical excuses, even endorsements of Jared Kushner’s reported efforts during the transition period to use secret Russian communication means to communicate with Moscow’s decision makers. Since nothing happens in the Kremlin without Vladimir Putin, one has to assume that the communication the political novice Kushner had in mind was with his father-in-law’s most admired dictator Putin.

Come to think of, Kelly’s statement shouldn’t have surprised. Since taking over at the DHS the retired marine general has echoed or trumped Trump’s crazy ideas beginning with the need for The Wall to separating children from their parents in the most cruel enforcement policy against undocumented immigrants.

As for General McMaster, his impeccable credentials in the military took a hit earlier this month, when he refuted a Washington Post story that President Trump had revealed highly classified intelligence during his meeting with Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov and Russia’s Ambassador Kislyak by countering points that the Post had not made. Now add to this the General’s defense of a backchannel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin that Kushner tried to establish.

And then there is James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, who spoke out in support of his boss’s shocking behavior at NATO headquarters in Brussels that threatens the seven decades old transatlantic defense arrangement between the U.S. and European allies. As Mattis explained, previous presidents, too, complained about European countries’ insufficient financial contributions to NATO. What the General conveniently omitted is the real reason for the rift in the alliance, namely, Trump’s refusal to endorse NATO’s mutual defense agreement as stated in Article 5. Coming on the heels of Trump’s campaign statement that NATO is obsolete, Secretary Mattis, who once commanded NATO’s Supreme Allied Command for Transformation, should know better than depicting Trump’s dangerous reality show in Europe as merely business as usual.

Putin and his team are rejoicing. They wanted nothing more than a split in the transatlantic defense alliance. And now they got it.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is right. Europe can no longer count on the America of Donald Trump as a dependable NATO ally.

As it turns out, the generals are not the voices of reason, not the adults in White House and administration.